From No Food to Slow-Food: Famine and Feasting in Italian Culinary Culture

In this team-taught, interdisciplinary seminar, we will sample and taste the symbolic and material history of Italian food, focusing in particular on literary, artistic and cinematic representations. How did famine and plenty inspire medieval poetry and Renaissance art? How was a single "Italian" cuisine born out of many “regional” ones? How did Italian migrants shape the image of Italian food around the world? What does Futurist cuisine look and taste like? How did an Italian-born food philosophy turn into a global environmentalist movement?